Chaos

They called me Chaos. Everyone loved it. I was the best night out you’d ever had. I was also dying but that bit didn’t make the group chat.

I cheated. I drank. I had more partners than I could count on both hands and I got a kick out of every single one. Not because the sex was always good. Sometimes it was awful. But because the wanting was a drug and I was mainlining it.

Someone wants me. I exist.
Someone chose me. I matter.
Someone is looking at me like I’m the only woman in the room and for thirty seconds the noise stops.

That’s what it was. The noise. The constant, grinding, background noise of not being enough. Of having been broken too young and rebuilt too fast with the wrong materials. The attention was spackle. It filled the cracks long enough for me to pretend they weren’t there.

I hurt people. The decent boyfriend I’d left for the musician. The ones after him. The ones who thought I was fun and spontaneous when actually I was feral and frightened. I broke things that worked because working felt suspicious. If it was calm, something was wrong. If someone was kind, there was a catch.

Swinging was part of it. Exploration tangled up with damage. Some of it was genuinely fun and I won’t pretend otherwise because that dishonesty doesn’t serve anyone. Some of it was me standing in a room full of people who wanted my body and thinking this is what power feels like while having absolutely no idea what power actually was.

Everyone loved Chaos. She was hilarious. She was unpredictable. She was the one who’d say the thing nobody else would say and laugh the loudest and stay out the latest and make you feel like the night would never end.

She was also alone at 4am eating toast over the sink wondering why none of it was enough.

Chaos wasn’t a personality. She was a coping mechanism with good shoes.

I retired her eventually. Not all at once. You don’t retire a persona. You just stop needing it. You find something real enough to replace the performance and the audience drifts away and one morning you wake up and the house is quiet and you realise the person left standing when the music stops is just you.

Just you is terrifying. But at least she’s real.